Influence Maps

Lots of games that require large groups of characters combating or main gameplay loop is based around determining and assessing tactical and position decisions need way to calculate the danger of it Ai combatants while in the game. Influence maps are a great way to monitor and share this information to the player and Ai enemy's in game. Influence maps operate by often dividing a space into cells then adding a value to each cell that can represent something of your choosing, whether it be distance from some, level of danger this unit is it, the possibility's are endless. Once this grid is created, you adjust the influence per cell based on your agents range of influence, and example from my project is that when i left click on the games grid its spawns a tower with a range of influence up to 5 cells away going from one at the center to 0 at the edges.

Once you have this range of influence on in your game, you just have to affect your game loop based on its influence. Want a tower to start shooting at a target when they enter a certain range? Make your tower check for enemies in a certain value of influence. Want to highlight enemy's that are in a grenades radius? Check if there influence is greater then 0 then apply the highlight. Here is a video of my project and what I did for my gameplay loop, thank for reading!